Shangri-la
THouGH the Cadillac has long replaced the covered wagon, and the Sioux are inoculated each Fall, a yearning for the untrammelled pioneer life occasionally steals over the city-dweller on fresh autumn days. It is no good going to America now : but it sometimes seems that Australia might be the Middle West of our time. But 15,000 miles is a long way, and we do not know very much about the Commonwealth. There is The Fortunes of Richard Ma/way, but it deals with a bygone age, when the settlers and the convicts were less easily distinguished. There are Ruth Park and Nevil Shute. There is the well-dressed cockney in St. James's Street who turns out to be worth half a million pounds of sheep ; and the hunks of men who glisten in photographs of Bondi Beach. And the Australia that stays in our mind is a large, extrovert nation : consumed with a passion for exercise, and largely devoid of culture.
Two new books between them do much to improve our knowledge of the country ; in one way they support the view that Australia can provide all the excitement, work and liberty that an urban emigrant could wish for : but the picture they give us of the people is not very encouraging. Some of our best friends are Australian, of course, but that doesn't mean that we should get on with a township of them.
Mr. Moorehead is an entertaining writer, the pleasant stranger over a glass of beer, the understanding Immigration Officer. The' abo " in the Rolls, the one-track railway to the north lined for a thousand miles with empty beer-bottles, the disastrous luxury hotel, are illuminating spiders in his web of real, but never very deep, under- standing. His correspondent's eye sweeps crisply, over his native land ; and he is nostalgic for the "days when everything was an • experiment and a discovery," which is one in ,the eye for our Daniel Boone fantasies. And he reminds us of the prospector who turned up in Darwin in late 1949 with a collection of grey rocks that he had picked up in Rum Jungle : Australia had entered the uranitim business.
Miss- Gallati's book is a disjointed, perky account of a year spent in the Antipodes. She writes in an irritating present-tense, and is often arch ; but she puts her teeth into one bone after another, trivial and important, and gnaws them so much that in the end we have to laugh. Her candour is refreshingly free from prejudice ;
people fascinate me, intrigue me, and I like to know what makes them tick." She shows us, and provides a first-class introduction to metropolitan Australia.
The country they paint is enchanting : koala bears, coral reefs, milkmen earning fifteen pounds a week, frigidaires in the desert, and vendettas in Darwin. For a moment it seems as though this vigorous, attractive country may be the Shangri-la that we seek in vain in the advertisement columns of the evening papers. Perhaps we could even learn to recite " What are the wild wives sighing " with a straight face. But we had forgotten Runt Jungle ; and the guided missiles. The whistle of Woomera is filling the air. All passes must soon be shown at the Great Barrier Reef. It is probably better to renew our subscription to Harrods' library after all.
DAVID STONE.
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